The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  "How is he?" the lieutenant snarled. "How would he be after gettin' worked over with—" He broke off, his eyes flickering. "As a matter of fact," he said heavily, "he's going to be all right. He was pretty badly injured, but he was able to give us a statement and—"

  "I'm so glad. But why are you questioning me, then?" It was another trick. Bill had to be dead. "If he gave you a statement, then you must know that everything happened just like I said."

  She waited, looked at him quizzically. Powers scowled, his stern face wrinkling with exasperation.

  "All right," he said at last. "All right, Mrs. Clinton. Your husband is dead. We don't have any statement from him, and we don't have any confession from Tony."

  "Yes?"

  "But we know that you're guilty, and you know that you are. And you'd better get it off your conscience while you still can."

  "While I still can?"

  "Doc"—Powers jerked his head at the doctor. At the man, that is, who appeared to be a doctor. "Lay it on the line, Doc. Tell her that her boyfriend hit her a little too hard."

  The man came forward hesitantly. He said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Clinton. You have a—uh—you've sustained a very serious injury."

  "Have I?" Ardis smiled. "I feel fine."

  "I don't think," the doctor said judiciously, "that that's quite true. What you mean is that you don't feel anything at all. You couldn't. You see, with an injury such as yours—"

  "Get out," Ardis said. "Both of you get out."

  "Please, Mrs. Clinton. Believe me, this isn't a trick. I haven't wanted to alarm you, but —"

  "And you haven't," she said. "You haven't scared me even a little bit, mister. Now, clear out!"

  She closed her eyes, kept them closed firmly. When, at last, she reopened them, Powers and the doctor—if he really had been a doctor—were gone. And the room was in darkness.

  She lay smiling to herself, congratulating herself. In the corridor outside, she heard heavy footsteps approaching; and she tensed for a moment. Then, remembering, she relaxed again.

  Not Bill, of course. She was through with that jerk forever. He'd driven her half out of her mind, got her to the point where she couldn't have taken another minute of him if her life depended on it. But now...

  The footsteps stopped in front of her door. A key turned in the lock, the door opened and closed.

  There was a clatter of a lunch pail being set down; then a familiar voice— maddeningly familiar words:

  "Well. Another day, another dollar."

  Ardis's mouth tightened; it twisted slowly in a malicious grin. So they hadn't given up yet! They were pulling this one last trick. Well, let them; she'd play along with the gag.

  The man plodded across the room, stooped, and gave her a halfhearted peck on the cheek. "Long time no see," he said. "What we havin' for supper?"

  "Bill..." Ardis said. "How do I look, Bill?"

  "OK. Got your lipstick smeared, though. What'd you say we was having for supper?"

  "Stewed owls! Now, look, mister. I don't know who you—"

  "Sounds good. We got any hot water?"

  "Of course, we've got hot water! Don't we always have? Why do you always have to ask if—if—"

  She couldn't go through with it. Even as a gag —even someone who merely sounded and acted like he did —it was too much to bear.

  "Y-you get out of here!" she quavered. "I don't have to stand for this! I c-can't stand it! I did it for fifteen years, and—"

  "So what's to get excited about?" he said. "Well, guess I'll go splash the chassis."

  "Stop it! STOP IT!" Her screams filled the room ...silent screams ripping through silence. "He's—you're dead! I know you are! You're dead, and I don't have to put up with you for another minute. And —and— !"

  "Wouldn't take no bets on that if I was you," he said mildly. "Not with a broken neck like yours."

  He trudged off toward the bathroom, wherever the bathroom is in Eternity.

  FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE

  1968: Cornell Woolrich

  CORNELL (GEORGE HOPLEY) WOOLRICH (1903–1968) was born in New York City but divided his early years between Latin America and Mexico, with his father, and New York, with his Manhattan socialite mother. While still an undergraduate at Columbia University, he wrote his first novel, a romance, Cover Charge (1926). Another romantic novel, Children of the Ritz (1927), quickly followed, and it won a $10,000 prize jointly offered by College Humor magazine and First National Pictures, which filmed it in 1929. Four more romantic novels, favorably compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed. Woolrich had also begun to write short stories, and his first mystery was published in 1934. Most of his subsequent work (more than two hundred stories and sixteen novels) was in that genre. A reclusive alcoholic, he rarely left his hotel room for the last three decades of his life.

  Arguably the greatest suspense writer of the twentieth century, Woolrich, under his own name and the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley, was able to construct plots that stretched credulity, especially in their dependence on coincidence, yet relentlessly gripped readers. He is noted for producing stories of the everyday gone wrong, as terrible things happen to ordinary people. More than twenty of his novels and stories were filmed, including The Leopard Man (1943), based on Black Alibi (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur; Phantom Lady (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak; Rear Window (1954), based on "It Had to Be Murder" and directed by Alfred Hitchcock; and The Bride Wore Black (1967), directed by François Truffaut. More true of the literary works than the motion pictures (since Hollywood preferred happy endings), Woolrich was able to heighten suspense by being totally unpredictable, with readers never knowing if the suspense would be relieved or if it would be worse when the tale was ended.

  "For the Rest of Her Life," the last Woolrich story published during his lifetime, first appeared in the May 1968 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and was first collected in his Angels of Darkness (1978). It was made into a two-hour television movie in West Germany in 1974, directed and adapted for the screen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

  ***

  THEIR EYES MET in Rome. On a street in Rome—the Via Piemonte. He was coming down it, coming along toward her, when she first saw him. She didn't know it but he was also coming into her life, into her destiny—bringing what was meant to be.

  Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.

  If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.

  As their eyes met, they held. For just a heartbeat.

  He wasn't cheap. He wasn't sidewalk riffraff. His clothes were good clothes, and his air was a good air.

  He was a personable-looking man. First your eye said: he's not young anymore, he's not a boy anymore. Then your eye said: but he's not old. There was something of youth hovering over and about him, and yet refusing to land in any one particular place. As though it were about to take off and leave him. Yet not quite that, either. More as though it had never fully been there in the first place. In short, the impression it was, was agelessness. Not young, not old, not callow, not mature—but ageless. Thirty-six looking fifty-six, or fifty-six looking thirty-six, but which it was you could not say.

  Their eyes met—and held. For just a heartbeat.

  Then they passed one another by, on the Via Piemonte, but without any turn of their heads to prolong the look.

  I wonder who that was, she thought.

  What he thought couldn't be known—at least, not by her.

  Three nights later they met again, at a party the friend she was staying with took her to.

&nb
sp; He came over to her, and she said, "I've seen you before. I passed you on Monday on the Via Piemonte. At about four in the afternoon."

  "I remember you, too," he said. "I noticed you that day, going by."

  I wonder why we remember each other like that, she mused; I've passed dozens, hundreds of other people since, and he must have too. I don't remember any of them.

  "I'm Mark Ramsey," he said.

  "I'm Linda Harris."

  An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of love, and none of its drawbacks. No jealousy, no quarrels, no greed to possess, no fear of losing possession, no hatred (which is very much a part of love), no surge of passion, and no hangover afterward. It never reaches the heights, and it never reaches the depths.

  As a rule it comes on subtly. As theirs did. As a rule the two involved are not even aware of it at first. As they were not. As a rule it only becomes noticeable when it is interrupted in some way, or broken off by circumstances. As theirs was. In other words, its presence only becomes known in its absence. It is only missed after it stops. While it is still going on, little thought is given to it, because little thought needs to be.

  It is pleasant to meet, it is pleasant to be together. To put your shopping packages down on a little wire-backed chair at a little table at a sidewalk café, and sit down and have a vermouth with someone who has been waiting there for you. And will be waiting there again tomorrow afternoon. Same time, same table, same sidewalk café. Or to watch Italian youth going through the gyrations of the latest dance craze in some inexpensive indigenous night-place—while you, who come from the country where the dance originated, only get up to do a sedate fox trot. It is even pleasant to part, because this simply means preparing the way for the next meeting.

  One long continuous being-together, even in a love affair, might make the thing wilt. In an attachment it would surely kill the thing off altogether. But to meet, to part, then to meet again in a few days, keeps the thing going, encourages it to flower.

  And yet it requires a certain amount of vanity, as love does: a desire to please, to look one's best, to elicit compliments. It inspires a certain amount of flirtation, for the two are of opposite sex. A wink of understanding over the rim of a raised glass, a low-voiced confidential aside about something and the smile of intimacy that answers it, a small impromptu gift—a necktie on the one part because of an accidental spill on the one he was wearing, or of a small bunch of flowers on the other part because of the color of the dress she has on.

  So it goes.

  And suddenly they part, and suddenly there's a void, and suddenly they discover they have had an attachment.

  Rome passed into the past, and became New York.

  Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again—while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting—then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love.

  She was thinking of him at the moment the phone rang. And that helped, too, by its immediacy, by its telephonic answer to her wistful wish of remembrance. Memory is a mirage that fools the heart...

  "You'll never guess what I'm holding in my hand, right while I'm talking to you...

  "I picked it up only a moment ago, and just as I was standing and looking at it, the phone rang. Isn't that the strangest thing! ...

  "Do you remember the day we stopped in and you bought it...

  "I have a little one-room apartment on East Seventieth Street. I'm by myself now, Dorothy stayed on in Rome..."

  A couple of months later, they were married ...

  They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now.

  But she failed to add: If you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn't you be unable to know what the whole thing's about? Just blindly clutch and hold and fear that it will get away. But unable to stop, to think, to give it any name.

  Just two more people sharing a common human experience. Infinite in its complexity, tricky at times, but almost always successfully surmounted in one of two ways: either blandly content with the results as they are, or else vaguely discontent but chained by habit. Most women don't marry a man, they marry a habit. Even when a habit is good, it can become monotonous; most do. When it is bad in just the average degree it usually becomes no more than a nuisance and an irritant; and most do.

  But when it is darkly, starkly evil in the deepest sense of the word, then it can truly become a hell on earth.

  Theirs seemed to fall midway between the first two, for just a little while. Then it started veering over slowly toward the last. Very slowly, at the start, but very steadily...

  They spent their honeymoon at a New Hampshire lakeshore resort. This lake had an Indian name which, though certainly barbaric in sound to the average English-speaker, in her special case presented such an impassable block both in speech and in mental pre-speech imagery (for some obscure reason, Freudian perhaps, or else simply an instinctive retreat from something with distressful connotations) that she gave up trying to say it and it became simply "the lake." Then as time drew it backward, not into forgetfulness but into distance, it became "that lake."

  Here the first of the things that happened, happened. The first of the things important enough to notice and to remember afterward, among a great many trifling but kindred ones that were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful gestures. (Once he accidentally poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of a waitress's wrist, by not waiting long enough for the waitress to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by turning his head momentarily the other way. The waitress yelped, and he apologized, but he showed his teeth as he did so, and you don't show your teeth in remorse.)

  One morning when she woke up, he had already dressed and gone out of the room. They had a beautifully situated front-view of rooms which overlooked the lake itself (the bridal suite, as a matter of fact), and when she went to the window she saw him out there on the white-painted little pier which jutted out into the water on knock-kneed piles. He'd put on a turtleneck sweater instead of a coat and shirt, and that, over his spare figure, with the shoreward breeze alternately lifting and then flattening his hair, made him look younger than when he was close by. A ripple of the old attraction, of the old attachment, coursed through her and then was quickly gone. Just like the breeze out there. The little sidewalk-café chairs of Rome with the braided-wire backs and the piles of parcels on them, where were they now? Gone forever; they couldn't enchant anymore.

  The lake water was dark blue, pebbly-surfaced by the insistent breeze that kept sweeping it like the strokes of invisible broom-straws, and mottled with gold flecks that were like floating freckles in the nine o'clock September sunshine.

  There was a little boy in bathing trunks, tanned as a caramel, sitting on the side of the pier, dangling his legs above the water. She'd noticed him about in recent days. And there was his dog, a noisy, friendly, ungainly little mite, a Scotch terrier that was under everyone's feet all the time.

  The boy was throwing a stick in, and the dog was splashing after it, retrieving it, and paddling back. Over and over, with that tirelessness and simplicity of interest peculiar to all small boys and their dogs. Off to one side a man was bringing up one of the motorboats that were for rent, for Mark to take out.

  She could hear him in it for a while after that, making a long slashing ellipse around the lake, the din of its vibration alternately soaring and lulling as it passed from the far side to the near and then back to the far side again.


  Then it cut off suddenly, and when she went back to look it was rocking there sheepishly engineless. The boy was weeping and the dog lay huddled dead on the lake rim, strangled by the boiling backwash of the boat that had dragged it—how many times?—around and around in its sweep of the lake. The dog's collar had become snagged some way in a line with a grappling hook attached, left carelessly loose over the side of the boat. (Or aimed and pitched over as the boat went slashing by?) The line trailed limp now, and the lifeless dog had been detached from it.

  "If you'd only looked back," the boy's mother said ruefully to Mark. "He was a good swimmer, but I guess the strain was too much and his little heart gave out."

  "He did look! He did! He did! I saw him!" the boy screamed, agonized, peering accusingly from in back of her skirt.

  "The spray was in the way," Mark refuted instantly. But she wondered why he said it so quickly. Shouldn't he have taken a moment's time to think about it first, and then say, "The spray must have been—" or "I guess maybe the spray—" But he said it as quickly as though he'd been ready to say it even before the need had arisen.

  Everyone for some reason acted furtively ashamed, as if something unclean had happened. Everyone but the boy, of course. There were no adult nuances to his pain.

  The boy would eventually forget his dog.

  But would she? Would she?

  They left the lake—the farewells to Mark were a bit on the cool side, she noticed— and moved into a large rambling country house in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, not far from Pittsfield, which he told her had been in his family for almost seventy-five years. They had a car, an Alfa Romeo, which he had brought over from Italy, and, at least in all its outward aspects, they had a not too unpleasant life together. He was an art importer, and financially a highly successful one; he used to commute back and forth to Boston, where he had a gallery with a small-size apartment above it. As a rule he would stay over in the city, and then drive out Friday night and spend the weekend in the country with her.